The exponential growth of the economies of China and India has won for these Asian giants a position of global economic and political prominence. But this process has been accompanied by profound internal discontent, some of which takes violent forms. The respective domestic experiences may be very different, but there are enough commonalities to suggest a lesson for the dominant economic model to which both states now adhere.

The east's far west

The killing of sixteen police officers and the
wounding of sixteen others in an operation in the western Chinese oasis city of
Kashgar on 4
August 2008 was the most severe incident of anti-authority political violence in China for many
months. The precise responsibility
remains to be established, but it is likely to have been perpetrated by a
separatist Islamist group which sees itself as acting on behalf of the majority
Uighur population of Xinjiang region (where Kashgar is situated). The timing,
in the very week of the opening of the Olympic games in Beijing on 8 August -
and following an apparently coordinated attack on two buses in Kunming in the southwest province of
Yunnan on 21 July which killed two people - further suggests a political
motivation.

Paul Rogers is professor of peace studies at Bradford University,
northern England.
He has been writing a weekly column on global security on openDemocracy since 26 September 2001

The nature and timing of these incidents have
guaranteed widespread media attention in the ensuing days, both in China itself
(where a year marked by the Tibet riots and the Sichuan earthquake has seen
more open coverage in the official media, partly a result of its unofficial
proliferation) and internationally. This is welcome insofar as greater
discussion of such security issues can aid the search for understanding and
solutions. At the same time, it is important not to extrapolate too far from
the Kashgar attack, as it is a (still) relatively isolated example of
paramilitary violence rather than in itself evidence of a long-term campaign.

Moreover, amid the understandable focus on the
incident it is easy to forget that China is already host to far more
numerous, collective and large-scale explosions of major social unrest. These
have persisted for a number of years and continue to cause grave concern to
national and local governments alike.

China: a tide of protest

China's economic growth over almost two decades has
been impressive. It has also been heavily concentrated in the major
conurbations, especially on or around the east and southeast coasts. As the
economic divisions have widened, so frustration has grown, often taking the
form of disputes over land (see Li Datong, "The next land revolution?", 8 August 2007) but an even more common
phenomenon has been the incidence of bitter anti-authority activism in the wake
of individual incidents.

Three incidents in July 2008 alone indicate
the pattern:

* a huge demonstration and riot in Guzhou
province, southwest China.
As many as 30,000 people mobilised in response to claims that police had covered
up the alleged rape and murder of a teenage girl; cars and government buildings
were set on fire (see Li Datong, "The Weng'an model: China's
fix-it governance",
30 July 2008)

* a three-day demonstration by hundreds of migrant
workers in Zhejiang province, eastern China. The
protest began on 10 July after the arrest of one of their number by police

* an attack on a police station and local
administrative offices on 17 July by more than a hundred people near Huizhou, Guangdong
province. This was sparked by rumours that a motorcyclist had been beaten to
death by the police. In the
confrontation, one person was killed and ten injured.

In addition to his weekly openDemocracy column, Paul Rogers writes an international security
monthly briefing for the Oxford Research Group; for details, click here

Paul Rogers's most recent
book is Why We're Losing the War on Terror (Polity, 2007) - an
analysis of the strategic misjudgments of the post-9/11 era and why a new
security paradigm is needed

These are just a handful of many thousands of
examples of violent social unrest in China each year. The great majority
is directed against police and government officials, and only a few of them are
reported in the media outside the country. There is no one specific cause, but
behind the phenomenon often lies intense frustration at the disabling effects
and profound inequalities that China's
remarkable economic growth has generated.

The level of discontent was already so high in
2005 that the government established 600-strong elite police squads in
thirty-six cities to respond to riots and other disturbances. Each squad is
equipped with helicopters, armoured cars and a range of weapons, and is ready
to respond at short notice to protests that - as many do - erupting suddenly
and without warning. As one journalist commented at the time:

"People are becoming bolder in voicing
their grievances in a society in which economic liberalisation has created a
yawning gap between urban rich and urban poor, and under an authoritarian
system that offers numerous opportunities for officials to get rich through
corruption" (see Jane Macartney, "China creates crack unit to
crush poverty protests",
Times, 20 August 2005).

Some western observers argue with a degree
of justification that these tensions are clear indications of the low degree of
democracy and accountability in China.
This factor must indeed be part of the overall assessment, but a comparison
here with another huge country undergoing rapid economic and social change in
the context of a wider globalisation suggests that it cannot be the only or
even the most decisive variable. For India too - China's great neighbour,
sometime strategic rival and economic competitor - is also experiencing a wave
of social protest triggered by (for example) environmental degradation and land seizures; equally significant, a sustained
campaign of organised political violence in India now affects more than half of the country's twenty-eight states.

India: an arc of insurgency

India's high-powered economic growth in the 2000s
has been as impressive if not quite as sustained as China's; equally, its results have
been most beneficial to the urban middle-classes in the country's urban centres
rather than to the rural poor. A striking and largely unexpected feature of
these years, however, has been the continued and increasing vigour of the
rebellion by the Naxalite guerrilla movement (see Ajai Sahni, "India and its Maoists: failure
and success",
20 March 2007).

The Naxalite rebellion, named after one of the
original villages involved (Naxalbari in West Bengal)
originated in 1967. Its political leadership developed its ideology and
strategy from Maoism, though its appeal to its militants and supporters may
often have owed more to its defence of their rights and interests rather than
to its propaganda. In any event, it was long regarded as being more a
persistent but barely effective irritant rather than a serious threat - until a
few years of surprisingly rapid expansion; to the extent that India's prime minister Manmohan Singh described
the Naxalites in April 2006 as "the biggest internal security challenge ever faced by our country".

Indeed, a detailed analysis by PV Ramana finds that the rebels are active in
185 districts in seventeen out of India's twenty-eight states (see
"Red Storm Rising", Jane's
Intelligence Review, June 2008). The government has imposed legal measures against the Naxalites' political leadership and actions seen as in support of it, as have states most affected by the movement (such as Chhattisgarh); but these have often proved ineffective or counterproductive.

A by-product of this attention is the
comparable neglect of the Naxalite rebels,
whose rural bases in an expanding "red belt" in eastern India and
support from great numbers of people in marginalised and poor communities has
made them both less accessible to media attention and less high-profile as a
topic of investigation (see Suhas Chakma, "India's war with itself", 2 April 2007).

The remoteness of the movement from the lives
of urban Indians is diminishing, however, for a significant trend in the
Naxalites' thinking is the evolution of a more cohesive national strategy. An
important development in this respect was the merging of several Naxalite
groups into the Communist Party of India-Maoist (CPI-M) in 2004. This enabled
it to evolve a central strategic direction, valuable for a movement that had hitherto
been very dispersed.

The new strategy has as one of its elements a
targeting of India's
economic infrastructure. In July 2008, for example, Naxalite paramilitaries
blew up a stretch of railway track on the Patna-Howrah route; they then waited
until it had been repaired and destroyed it again at another site on the same route.
All this despite a large security presence less than a mile away.

This focus on vulnerable points of the modern
economy's network is facilitated by India's
rapid urbanisation; it is also aided by the authorities' inability to ensure
consistent supplies of basic services - oil, electricity, transport links - to many of India's people.
The combination of an expanding economy and failures of delivery leaves an
economy such as India's
with very little margin for error in terms of underlying support. The Naxalite
insurgents appear to have recognised this.

In addition, the enormous expansion of
megacities such as Mumbai and Kolkata has been marked by massive settlements of
new arrivals living in precarious conditions and working in the informal
economy. The political activists in and around such communities can find a
ready response among at least a section of this population, especially
when they emphasise the acute divisions of wealth and poverty in modern India.

A model of instability

The social unrest in India and China differs in its details and
its appearance. India's has more integrated organisation, China's is
characterised by more random and unpredictable outbreaks. There is a common
feature, however: both countries are experiencing protracted "revolts from
the margins" at the very time that they are being hailed as examples of
successful economic growth rooted in free-market liberalisation.

In one sense, however, India's
troubles can be seen as more intellectually disruptive. This relates to the
point made earlier about the lack of democracy and accountability in China. For if
(from a dominant western perspective) many of China's
problems can be attributed largely to its autocratic governance, then a
different approach would seem to be required in explaining why a functioning
democracy such as India should incubate a challenging
movement such as the Naxalite guerrillas. Indeed, a wider perspective might see
what is happening in both countries as
representing a direct challenge to prevailing economic orthodoxy.

More important is that the two most populous
countries in the world are, in the midst of intense and accelerating economic
and social change, experiencing serious internal-security problems - and this before the effects of environmental
limitations have begun to have their greatest impact.

In the 2010-2030 period, critical energy
shortages and a deteriorating climate will each have profound effects on India and China (see "Melting Asia", Economist, 5 June 2008). These will in turn create
the conditions for even greater social unrest than has occurred so far. This is
the largely unrecognised significance of India's
Naxalites and China's diversifiying social protests. In this generational light, the argument that
unrestrained economic growth will open the way to a shining future is
fantastical; and far less realistic than the argument for a transformation towards
global equity, freedom and sustainability.